Bye bye to my last mechanical drive, never again.

I had several SSDs ( a 1TB 840 evo and a 512gb 840 pro ) that I wasn't using as I had always used them for my main drive or gaming installation drive, never as bulk storage.

But as I decided to delete a bunch of crap on my 2TB mechanical drive and could easily split the backup stuff onto those 2 SSDs I got rid off the optical drive, removed the drive cage and extra sata power and data cables to clean up the case. Now I only have my 950 pro, and the 2 sata SSDs, and will soon have another M.2 drive, possibly waiting for the 970 pro.

My only way to judge the SSD speed has been how snappy the O.S feels and game load time, neither of which can really be compared to anything because load time for a game save or level etc always varies depending on whats going on and the game.

But I copied the files from my optical drive to the spare space on one of the SSDs and then took the optical drive out anjd copied the files to the other SSD to stay.

I was getting maybe 88-100mb going from ther mechanical to the SSD, and around 300 avg 400 mag from SSD to SSD. This is the first time I've ever had a qualitative way to see how limiting an mechanical drive is, because it was the same files, several hundred gig, mixed file size, and I saw the comparison right afterwards.

When installing games it's not like you do it as a benchmark, and then uninstall and install on another drive to see the difference, so I never saw the real world difference, only the perception of O.S responsiveness and game loading that is a bit faster.

There is no way I will ever use another mechanical drive after that,l not when you can use any old SSD for some of your file backups. That SSD is from 2012 and was 200% faster at a minimum.

My mistake wi9th the lingo, I always calld them mechanical drives but thought it had read people refering to them as optical so I wrote that.

Point still stands, updated title and thread....I'm never buying a mechanical drive again.

I have 1.5TB of sata SSD storage for backup and currently have a 950 pro which I install any games that will fit that I'm likely to play, and I will either buy a 2TB 960 pro or if the 970 series comes out between now and the end of the year ( which is the time frame the 950 and 960 series both came out in previous years ) I will get that for gaming, I will probably get a 2TB sata SSD depending on the price or a third M.2 drive on my next build, a 2TB evo m.2 drive if they make on and get rid of all the cables altogether.

My current PSU is only semi-modular but once I don't need the other cables I could get a power supply and only have the 6+2 pins and the motherboard 24 pin and the cpu connector, no other cables, no more mechanical drives. It will be glorious.

As the age of saving huge ammounts of data at home is nearly over, I probably won't buy a big mechanical drive in the future anymore, as well as certainly not for my gaming rig. The gaming rig is HDD free since 2015

i would love to ditch my HDD (500gb 7 year old barracuda) for SSD but seeing I want a 2tb drive to replace the backup/game drive. i rather pay 49$ for toshiba T300 2TB then pay200~ 300 for just 1TB SSD or 500~700 for a 2 TB prices are still to high on SSD

SSD for OS, SSD for steam games I play the most that need faster loading, 1TB for older steam games that dont need faster loading times, SSD for all other games that need for fast loading times i play alot, and 500GB for all older games that dont need fast loading times.

And my new motherboard has 2 m.2 slots so I may add 1 more 250GB SSD for OS. I use a USB 3.0 3TB for backup. It does 110mbs read and write over USB 3.0. Thats fast enough for backups and storage.

I use my 1TB 850pro for windows, programs, games, and photos. My hard drives are exclusively for video files now, this is working well for me. I can barely hear newer drives in my case so they never have bothered me. Would've been nice if SSD's were cheap enough to use as storage drives but I'm good with 4TB hard drives until then.

Typically, I use one small (but fast) SSD for my boot drive, a large (but slower) SSD for my data drive, and a very large HDD for rarely-accessed files and long-term storage. On my previous 4790K system, I used two 850 Pros in RAID0 for the boot drive, a 1 TB 840 Evo for data, and a 4 TB HDD for the rest. Currently, I've split the drives between my two main PCs (the gaming one has the 1 TB SSD and the computing one has the HDD, and both have a NVMe SSD for boot).

I probably won't be getting rid of HDDs entirely, although I will never use it to store OS and program files.